Augustine Of Hippo Quotes

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

When consent takes the form of seeking to possess the things we wish, this is called desire. When consent takes the form of enjoying the things we wish, this is called joy.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?

~ Augustine Of Hippo

He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

There is no sin unless through a man's own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

...a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith ... to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. ... when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture ... either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. ...let us choose [the doctrine] which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. ... For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of the writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

He was not utterly unskilled in handling his own lack of training, and he refused to be rashly drawn into a controversy about those matters from which there would be no exit nor easy way of retreat. This was an additional ground for my pleasure. For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful than the things I was anxious to know about.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Humility raises us not by human arrogance but by divine grace.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

It is indeed a song of steps. And as I have often said to you, these steps are not made to descend but to ascend. The questioner wishes then to ascend; and where does he wish to ascend if not to heaven? What does this mean—to ascend to heaven? Does he wish to ascend so as to be in the heavens with the sun, the moon, and the stars? Far from that! But there is in heaven an eternal Jerusalem where the angels, our co-citizens, are. From these co-citizens we on earth are estranged. In this exile we sigh; in the city we shall have joy.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of heresy.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

This is pride when the soul abandons Him to Whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

This, then, is true liberty: the joy that comes in doing what is right. At the same time, it is also devoted service in obedience to righteous precept.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

True inner righteousness does not judge according to custom but by the measure of the most perfect law of God Almighty by which the mores of various places and times were adapted to those places and times.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

The soul is torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Behold, now, how foolish it is, in so great an abundance of the truest opinions which can be extracted from these words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses particularly meant; and with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself, on account of which he hath spoken all the things whose words we endeavour to explain!

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:

~ Augustine Of Hippo

You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses: present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

... the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

This disease of curiosity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

He who falls, falls by his own will; and he who stands, stands by God's will.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

For in our hope we are saved.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

You have truly gained the mastery of the very stronghold of philosophy, Mother. For without doubt only for lack of words you did not elaborate on this subject as did Tullius [Cicero], whose words will follow. For in the Hortensius, the book he wrote on the praise and defense of philosophy, he said: ‘But see, surely not the philosophers but all given to argument say that those who live just as they wish are happy.’ This is definitely false; for to want what is not appropriate is the worst of all miseries. It is not so miserable not to get what you want as to want to get what you ought not. Wickedness of will brings to everyone greater evil than good fortune brings good.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.

~ Augustine Of Hippo